Author Archives: Jurgen De Wispelaere

The 2018 BIEN Congress, held in Tampere on 24-26 August, has released its revised conference program. In addition to a wide variety of panels and papers covering recent academic and policy discussions on basic income, the program features a series of exciting plenary speakers, including a plenary roundtable on basic income experiments and an opening address by Tarja Halonen, the former President of

The 18th BIEN Congress takes place in Tampere (Finland) on 23-26 August on the theme of “Basic Income and the New Universalism: Rethinking the Welfare State in the 21st Century”. We have already received many excellent proposals. For those of you who haven’t this week, this is your last chance to submit a proposal to present a paper or coordinate

ESPAnet is the leading comparative social policy conference in Europe. Jurgen De Wispelaere (Bath University) and Heikki Hiilamo (Helsinki University) are coordinating a stream on “The Political Economy of Basic Income: Opportunities, Constraints, Trajectories” for its upcoming conference on transformations of European welfare systems in Vilnius (Lithuania), on the 30th of August – 1st September 2018. The submission of papers

BIEN Congress 2018 is looking for film makers to display their production at the upcoming basic income congress in Tampere! The 2018 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress is planning to run a short film festival parallel to the talks, presentations and discussions at the upcoming BIEN Congress in Tampere on 23-26 August 2018. We invite enthusiastic cineasts and documentary

The 2018 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress has extended the deadline for submitting proposals for papers, themed panels or roundtables that cover any aspect of the justification, design, implementation, or politics of universal basic income. Send us your proposals (including a title, a short abstract of up to 250 words, and personal information) by the END OF FEBRUARY via our online submission. The new

Yesterday, the Swiss voted on the proposal to provide a basic income sufficient to allow the people to live in a dignified manner and participate in public life. The proposal was voted down with 23.1% of the voters in favour and 76.9% against. With a participation rate of 46.3% that boils down to little over 10% of the Swiss population

Basic income activists around the world are doing a great job (sic!) putting the idea of granting each individual an unconditional guaranteed income at the frontlines of policy proposals to combat poverty, social exclusion and economic inequality. A basic income is different from a wage precisely in that everyone gets it, independent of whether you are working in company or the public sector or not. One